The present invention relates to an electronic display of music, and more specifically, to an electronic music display appliance and a method for storing and displaying music scores.
Electronic music display devices have been proposed which can display music scores using input music score files with industry standard file formats. These files formats include notational and image based formats that have been developed for composing and publishing music scores on a fixed page size. Image based formats use image data to represent each page of a music score. Well known PNG, TIFF and JPG are representative of image formats. Notational formats use a set of instructions on how to build each page of a music score. The instructions include descriptions of notation elements and their associated location on a page. Well known NIFF and MusicXML are examples of notational formats. Examples of proprietary formats are those used in Finale® and Sibelius™ music composition and publishing programs.
Conventional electronic music display devices use processing methods and file formats that are not well suited for promptly displaying, manipulating, and modifying music scores. Limited capabilities of these devices can prevent practical operations, such as sequentially displaying repeated sections of music, resizing a portion of the music score, displaying a single instrument's part, displaying a single voice and rapidly jumping to an arbitrary measure. Some of the previous devices require the use of a separate computer to convert an original music score data file into another file format used for displaying images of the music score.